The House of Bonhoeffer is a fraternal organization at The King’s College, New York City. Founded in 2004, the House of Bonhoeffer strives to develop men of character that value discipleship, community, and courage. HouseofBonhoeffer.com is equipped to stream live events for viewers ranging from New York City to Kenya.

At the University Club last week for the Socrates in the City event with Dr. Dallas Willard.

In a matter of moments, I stepped into the building to see the doorman and the rest of the entryway. Bonhoeffer Junior Chad Abbott was waiting to brief us on our tasks for the evening and then gave us a tour of what proved to be one of the most breath-taking buildings I have had the privilege of visiting.

Tonight, though, it was not the facility that brought us to the University Club, but another opportunity to volunteer at a Socrates in the City event. On this particular evening, Socrates in the City had arranged for Christian philosopher Dallas Willard to speak to the ballroom filled with over 200 guests. Specifically, the topic at hand was the intersection between living in today’s world while pursuing spiritual knowledge. Dr. Willard was in town as a part of the most recent Presidential Scholars week at The King’s College, and had spent time lecturing to students in our Empire State Building Campus before coming to Socrates in the City.

Dr. Willard graduated from Tennessee Temple College in 1956 with a B.A. in Psychology, and from Baylor University in 1957 with a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion. He went to graduate school at Baylor University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning a Ph.D. in Philosophy with a minor in the History of Science in 1964. Willard has most recently taught at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he served as Director of the School of Philosophy from 1982–1985.

His publications in philosophy are concerned primarily with epistemology, the philosophy of mind and of logic, and with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. In addition to teaching and writing about philosophy, Willard gives lectures and writes books about Christianity and Christian living.

Five volunteers helped out the Socrates in the City staff prior to the event, in addition to myself and Chad. I was pleased to work with Christopher Hanson, John Sailer, Jeremy Hinen, Chris Kendall, and Sarah Doyle (a friend from the House of Barton). The men of Bonhoeffer have a proud tradition of working with Eric Metaxas on his Socrates in the City events, and this was one of many events that we have volunteered at this year. At the event with Dr. Willard, we were pleased to help register and seat guests, sell books, assist with set up, and facilitate the book signings.

We were also lucky enough to hear Dr. Willard’s lecture once the event began. He spoke for about thirty minutes on topics relating to the Christian life. Following his lecture, we helped clean up the ballroom.

Emery Baumann is a freshman in the House of Bonhoeffer.

Roasting a whole pig at Dr. Salyers's house.

It all started during the 2006-2007 academic year when the executive teams of Bonhoeffer and Lewis decided to have a barbecue get-together. Since Doc often graciously extends his hospitality to us for events, his house was the perfect setting. “Doc’s house is a great place for community,” explains Mark Thorne who was the President of Bonhoeffer at the time, “and we were particularly friendly with Lewis, so it was a no-brainer to have the event with them.”

Senituli Penitani, a student in the House of Lewis from Tonga, offered to do a traditional South Pacific pit roast of an entire pig for the event. Because it takes about nine hours to cook, the plan was for Seni to roast the pig the day before and then to have everyone come over the next day to feast. Incidentally, that’s the reason the event is traditionally held on a Sunday. The preparations did not go as expected that year; Doc did not realize that Seni would first have to dig hole in his backyard about six feet deep to properly insulate the pig. Suffice to say, they opted out of this option and decided to cook pork on the grill instead.

The tradition of the pig roast went dormant for a few years until it was revived by Kyle McCracken of the House of Lewis and our own Matthias Clock in spring of 2010. That year we actually roasted a whole pig on Doc’s grill. This tradition is significant as it is our oldest joint event with another men’s house and our second oldest joint event after our traditional Valentine’s Day activities with the ladies of Truth. We continue the pig roast today to bond with our friends in Lewis through fellowship, tradition, and mouth-watering food that is strictly non-Kosher.

Andrew Debter is a junior in the House of Bonhoeffer and currently serving as our Scholar.

The House of Bonhoeffer is a fraternal organization at The King’s College, New York City. Founded in 2004, the House of Bonhoeffer strives to develop men of character that value discipleship, community, and courage. HouseofBonhoeffer.com is equipped to stream live events for viewers ranging from New York City to Kenya.

Mrs. Gingrich addresses students at The King's College. Photo by Benjamin Gotchel.

Jeremy Cerone and Bonhoeffer junior Chad Abbott, Executive Director and Communications Director (respectively) of The King’s College Republicans, communicated with Mrs. Gingrich’s staff to organize the event, and also provided photography and video coverage of the event. The Office of the President even provided free pizza for the students. “Mrs. Gingrich’s team was a pleasure to work with in orchestrating this event,” says Chad. “I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to give the student body access to such a high-profile speaker.”

After a thorough introduction by Jeremy Cerone, Mrs. Gingrich delivered her talk on American Exceptionalism. She lamented the fact that many children and young adults these days are discouraged from being patriotic about their country. She also discussed the conception and creation of her new children’s book, Sweet Land of Liberty. A signed copy of this book was given away in a contest by The King’s College leading up to the event. You can watch her speech in the video at the end of this article.

After her speech, Mrs. Gingrich took ample time to meet students in an informal meet-and-greet session. The line stretched across the room, but Mrs. Gingrich made it a point to chat and be photographed with each waiting student. Bonhoeffer freshman Christopher Hanson was thrilled to have made her acquaintance, saying she was “one of the nicest women [he’d] ever met.”

Mrs. Gingrich’s visit to King’s was rounded out by a tour of the King’s campus and a visit to the Empire State Building observatory, hosted by Chad Abbott. Mrs. Gingrich enjoyed her visit, later tweeting: “Enjoyed speaking with a room full of future leaders at The King’s College in New York last night.”

Benjamin Gotchel is a freshman in the House of Bonhoeffer.

Please excuse the occasional audio problem or variation in this video. Our recording equipment encountered some difficulties at the church facility where this lecture was filmed.

The House of Bonhoeffer is a fraternal organization at The King’s College, New York City. Founded in 2004, the House of Bonhoeffer strives to develop men of character that value discipleship, community, and courage. HouseofBonhoeffer.com is equipped to stream live events for viewers ranging from New York City to Kenya.

I. The Man

Dietrich Bonhoeffer. February 4, 1906 - April 9, 1945. Died at age 39 at Flossenberg Concentration Camp in Nazi Germany.

Bonhoeffer was raised in a wealthy Berlin family: his father taught psychiatry at the University of Berlin, so his home was overrun with Germany intelligentsia, and suffused with a complacent but respectable cultural Lutheranism. His youth was dominated by the catastrophes of World War I (which claimed the life of his older brother Walter), and the social and economic travails of the Weimar Republic, whose runaway inflation, constitutional upheaval, and economic dislocation set the stage for the rise of National Socialism.

Though he studied under the liberal Lutheran giant Adolf Harnack at the University of Berlin, Bonhoeffer was deeply influenced by Karl Barth’s resounding “Nein!” to any attempt to fuse the mediatory role of Christ with revelations gleaned from nature or progressive culture, and also by Roman Catholic teaching on the social reality of the Church. During his brief time in New York City, he was powerfully influenced by the evangelical faith of the congregation at Abyssinian Baptist Church, and by the radical peace ethic of his friends at Union Theological Seminary. Bonhoeffer labored to bring together all of these concerns in his pastoral ministry within Germany’s Confessing Church, which refused assimilation by the Third Reich. Bonhoeffer’s opposition to the Reich ultimately brought him to aid a conspiracy among Nazi officers to assassinate Hitler; his involvement in the plot led to his imprisonment, and eventual execution.¹

II. The Singularity of Christ

Bonhoeffer’s theological writings are a relentless exercise in elaborating the singularity of Christ, and his immediate presence to his body, the Church. The mediation of Christ is a central theme in practically all of his works, but it plays a particularly decisive role in three: Creation and Fall, Christ the Center, and Life Together.

God creates in perfect freedom, argues Bonhoeffer in Creation and Fall: “There is no continuum that ties God to, or unites God with, God’s work – except God’s word.”² God speaks the perfect Word which is his Son, and just so, there are creatures. That we are presupposes Christ, but that we know ourselves as we are presupposes Christ also: “It is only from Christ that we can know about the original nature of humankind…Only in the middle, as those who live from Christ, do we know about the beginning.”³ We have no access to the true meaning of creation apart from its hermeneutic key, Jesus of Nazareth, “in whom all the fullness of Godhead dwells bodily” (Col 2:9) in whom are “hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:3).

But humanity rejects the sufficiency of God’s Word, seeking instead to find a vantage apart from it from which to judge God’s word.⁴ This, Bonhoeffer, insists, is the true meaning of the temptation in Genesis 3, of Eve’s response to the serpent’s question, “Did Godreally say not to eat of the Tree?” This question places Eve in a position to question God’s goodness, to assert herself as judge, as “like God.” Maintaining that the natural tendency of pride is to judgment, and that of judgment to classification, Bonhoeffer argues, “no sooner are people together than they begin to observe, judge, and classify each other.”⁵ Bonhoeffer names sin – against God and neighbor – as the Promethean drive to master the being of another, to be exalted as judge over another.⁶Because Adam and Eve questioned God, fallen humankind now questions each other. Now, one can only know another in so far as “it is possible to place [him or her] in an already existing classification,” and so fallen creation is endlessly populated with idolatrous rulers, authorities, powers, and dominions (Eph 1:21), the structures that sustain servitude and humiliation in all its guises.⁷

In light of our fallenness, the work of Christ is to re-assert the primacy of God’s Word over against every human word. Because the fallen Ego does not bother with asking the question ‘Who?,’ but instead says, “I will tell you who you are,” it had to be presented with a “Counter-Logos” which it could not classify, and so was bound to kill.⁸ So, when Jesus stands before Pilate, the Roman governor asks imperiously, “Are you a king?” But Jesus refuses to accommodate Pilate’s longing for the certitude of a rival power he can crush – “My kingdom is not of this world…You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world–to bear witness to the truth” (Jn 18:33-34, 37). Pilate mockingly inquires, “What is truth?” (Jn 18:39), and later reminds Jesus that he holds the power of life and death, the world’s ultimate word of judgment (Jn 19:10). Jesus suffers the world’s attempt to impose its meaning on his life, but then the Father does the unthinkable, overturning the world’s judgment, vindicating his judged Son by raising him as judge over all.

Bonhoeffer takes up this theme again in a later work, Christ the Center: “Christ the Word is truth. There is no truth apart from the Word and by the Word.”⁹ This means, he reasons, that Christ confronts us with the decisive address of God to us – he is not an eternal idea to be contemplated, but an urgent call to be heeded.¹⁰ Insofar as Christ is the shattering call of God to us, he constitutes what Bonhoeffer calls the “boundary” between us and the Father; his word is the cutting edge of the Kingdom pressing on the frailties of our fallen existence, and so shearing us into two selves, one fallen and miserable, another redeemed and glorious.¹¹ But Christ is not only the “boundary,” because in our self-division we cannot stand: “At this place stands Christ, between me and me, the old and the new existence,” at once “my boundary and my rediscovered center.” Christ stands over against us as the divine Word sent to overturn the barren certainties of ¹²the world’s order; but he stands amid us as the new Adam, raised as the first fruits of our coming redemption. Just so, Christ “is in the center of human existence, of history, and of nature.”¹³

That Christ is the “boundary and judgment of man” means that his perfect revelation of the Father calls out of our darkness and into the light; as boundary, Christ is that to which we press on. However, Christ does not merely call us onward, but offers himself as the way of our approach (Jn 14:6): he is “also the beginning of [man’s] new existence, his rediscovered center.”¹⁴ In all of this, Bonhoeffer simply reprises the classic Augustinian account of Christ’s mediation: “Our knowledge is therefore Christ, and our wisdom is the same Christ…Through him we go straight toward him, through knowledge toward wisdom, without ever turning aside from one and the same Christ” (De Trinitate 13.24).

For Bonhoeffer, Christ’s address to us, his uniting us to the Father, does not occur as an abstractly “spiritual” connection, but rather by way of a person’s incorporation into Christ’s body, the Church. So, Christ speaks to us in the Eucharist, the sacrament in which he is at once “by our side as creature, among us, brother with brother,” but also as “new creation,” who “in the sacrament breaks through the fallen creation at a defined point.”¹⁵ Christ is not present in the sacrament as a symbol or spiritual reality, “but the incarnate one, who has become flesh and blood, is in the sacrament as the stumbling block.”¹⁶ But because the gathered assembly is site at which Christ’s bodily presence is made available to the world, we must say that “Christ as sacrament is also in the Church and is the Church.”¹⁷ And we must be clear about this: “The Church is the body of Christ, it does not signify the body of Christ.”¹⁸

In Life Together, a work born out of his years with the renegade seminary at Finkenwalde, Bonhoeffer takes the bodily presence of Christ in the Church as the basis of Christian community: “We belong to each other only through and in Jesus Christ,”¹⁹ so that “wherever he is, he bears our flesh, he bears us.”²⁰ This means that Christian community is fully a gift of grace, consisting “solely in what Christ has done to both of us.”²¹ Christians can interpose no “human idealized image” of perfect community between their own brokenness and Christ’s redeeming work.²² It is not we who create the Church through our own ingenuity or self-determination; rather, “Christian community is…a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.”²³ The basic, sinful urge – already identified by Bonhoeffer in Christ the Center – is to seek to bypass the fundamental mediation of Christ by some immanent “principle of selection”:²⁴ in the American context, it is difficult not to think of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s caustic barb that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week. Such human divisions have no place in the body of Christ, “for he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” (Eph 2:14).

III. Absolute Obedience to the Risen Lord

Bonhoeffer’s most famous work concerns the absolute obedience due the Risen Lord, which Bonhoeffer summarizes with the terrifying aphorism, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”²⁵ The work takes aim against a pervasive heresy in the contemporary church (his and ours), which Bonhoeffer names “cheap grace…the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance…grace without the cross.”²⁶ To this parody of the gospel, Bonhoeffer opposes “costly grace,” which is “costly because it costs a man his life, and is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”²⁷

The Cost of Discipleship, as its early chapters make clear, is directed against a certain reading of Luther, in which Reformation teaching about the impossibility of earning salvation had been exalted into a formula for lawlessness and laxity: “We Lutherans have gathered like eagles round the carcass of cheap grace, and there we have drunk of the poison which has killed the life of following Christ.”²⁸ This poisonous teaching emerged most fundamentally in the Church giving faith a chronological priority over obedience, when the true task is to “never lose sight of their essential unity. For faith is real only when there is obedience.”²⁹

And for the Christian, argues Bonhoeffer, obedience will archetypally take the form of “suffering,” which is “the badge of true discipleship,” and a “joy and token of his grace.”³⁰ This suffering obedience is most fundamentally manifest in the Church’s defenselessness in the world, born out of Christ’s “precept of non-violence,” which “applies equally to private life and official duty.”³¹ Non-violence, for Bonhoeffer, is a not a feature of sectarian withdrawal, but rather belongs to the Church’s witness against the world’s violence; it is precisely “because the world is evil that the precept of non-resistance must be put into practice.”³²

If The Cost of Discipleship describes the need for absolute obedience to Christ, then the Ethics describes the conditions of that obedience.³³ We must admit the possibility of real development between this work and Discipleship, perhaps tied to the shocking burden Bonhoeffer felt compelled to shoulder by virtue of his involvement with the Officer’s Plot. For Bonhoeffer, the task of Christian ethics is something of a contradiction in terms:

Here, the “Kierkegaardian” strain in Bonhoeffer’s thought comes to full prominence: Kierkegaard had taught that obedience to Christ could require a “teleological suspension of the ethical,” an overturning of God’s commands in obedience to his immediate word (for Kierkegaaard, the paradigm case is when God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son.”) You can hear Kierkegaard in the above quotation, but if anything, it is Kierkegaard radicalized, with the “ethical” utterly aside in favor of teleological (he would probably have preferred “eschatological”) obedience.

VI. Celebrating Bonhoeffer’s “Birthday”

Feast days celebrating the Church’s martyrs are traditionally held on the anniversary of their deaths; Augustine had a habit of referring to these celebrations as the martyrs’ “birthdays,” as the day on which they were born into life eternal. Bonhoeffer is certainly a martyr of the Church, who bore witness (marturion) to the uniqueness of Christ and the integrity of His body against a monstrous regime that had eviscerated the gospel of reconciliation and taken the Church captive. It is fitting then, that we commemorate his testimony, meditate on his teachings, and implore God for the courage to follow his example.

Brendan Case is a graduate of The King’s College and a Bonhoeffer alumnus. He is currently attending Duke Divinity School.

^1 This biographical reflection is taken from Ferdinand Schlingensiepen’s excellent recent biography of Bonhoeffer: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance. Trans. Isabel Best: T&T Clark: New York City, 2010.

^2 Creation and Fall. Trans. Martin Ruter and Ilse Todt. Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 2004 (p. 40).

^3 Ibid., 63.

^4 Creation and Fall, 108.

^5 Ibid., 93.

^6 Christ the Center. Trans. Edwin Robertson. Harper and Row: New York, 1978, p.30.; In Creation and Fall, Bonhoeffer argues that we cannot know the beginning and anyone who claims to know the beginning was either in it (God), or is a liar (the Serpent). Humankind, according to Bonhoeffer, lives in the middle, in the twilight, wherein the Beginning is hidden (31).

^7 Ibid., 30.

^8 Christ the Center, 33.

^9 Ibid., 49.

^10 Ibid., 50.

^11 Ibid., 60.

^12 Ibid.

^13 Ibid.

^14 Ibid., 61

^15 Ibid., 57

^16 Ibid., 54. Bonhoeffer’s Eucharistic theology is essentially straight Luther, who argued that the body of the resurrected Christ, because it was now the site of divine self-revelation, had to be ubiquitous – the body of Christ, in Lutheran theology, is like the radio waves that float unseen through our midst; the Eucharist is the “receiver” that makes them uniquely available for the Church.

^17 Ibid., 59.

^18 Ibid.

^19 Life Together. Trans. Daniel Bloesch and James Burtness. Fortress: Minneapolis, MN, 2005, p. 31.

^20 Ibid., 34.

^21 Ibid.

^22 Ibid, 36.

^23 Ibid., 38.

^24 Ibid., 39.

^25 The Cost of Discipleship. Trans. R. H. Fuller. Touchstone: New York City, 1995 (p. 89).

^26 Ibid., 43-45

^27 Ibid., 45

^28 Ibid., 53

^29 Ibid., 64

^30 Ibid., 91.

^31Ibid., 143.

^32 Ibid., 144.

^33 The irony of elucidating conditions for absolute (or unconditional) obedience belongs to the very fabric of the work, and so is unavoidable here.

^34 Ethics. Trans. Neville Horton Smith. Touchstone: New York City, 1995. (p. 186).

The House of Bonhoeffer is a fraternal organization at The King’s College, New York City. Founded in 2004, the House of Bonhoeffer strives to develop men of character that value discipleship, community, and courage. HouseofBonhoeffer.com is equipped to stream live events for viewers ranging from New York City to Kenya.

The Houses of Bonhoeffer and Thatcher at Billy's Bakery last month.

President of The King’s College Dinesh D’Souza debated on the subject of his new book Godforsaken. His opponent was skeptic Bart Ehrman, and the debate took place at Socrates in the City, a monthly event hosted by Eric Metaxes. As with past Socrates events, the House of Bonhoeffer sent men to volunteer. Read about the debate here!

On Friday, March 9, the annual Mr. TKC competition was held. Freshman Charlie Freeman and John Sailer were contestants. Charlie performed Elvis’s “Love Me Tender” for the talent competition, and John played a song on the ukulele. The event was livestreamed and the video is available here.

Freshman John Sailer has been writing articles for the Empire State Tribune, the student-run online newspaper here at King’s. Check out some of his recent articles here!

Later in March, we had Spring Break at The King’s College. Some men of Bonhoeffer went home, others visited relatives, but freshman Benjamin Gotchel staying with a monastic order in upstate New York for the week. “It really helped me grow spiritually.” he says, “It was a worthwhile thing to do.”

Finishing March, Interregnum VIII took place. Interregnum, an annual TKC tradition, literally translates as “the time between kings” and is a three day period of competition, debate, and lecture where students set aside their textbooks and come together as a school to focus on a theme. This year’s theme was Tradition and Innovation. Read more about Interregnum VIII in this review, and watch videos from Interregnum on this special YouTube playlist.

The House of Bonhoeffer is a fraternal organization at The King’s College, New York City. Founded in 2004, the House of Bonhoeffer strives to develop men of character that value discipleship, community, and courage. HouseofBonhoeffer.com is equipped to stream live events for viewers ranging from New York City to Kenya.